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Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, ended her presidential campaign Thursday and endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden following Biden’s three-state victory earlier this week. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, now Biden’s sole rival in the 2020 Democratic primary, is reassessing his campaign in the wake of Biden’s wins in the Florida, Illinois and Arizona primaries on Tuesday.
Gabbard told reporters last December she would not rejoin the race through a third-party campaign and offered skeptical Democrats a more definitive and unifying message. “It’s clear that Democratic primary voters have chosen” Biden, she said in a video posted Thursday to Twitter.
A Sanders spokesman meanwhile denied that the Vermont senator was suspending his campaign Wednesday afternoon, but that word came as Sanders pulled down digital advertising on Facebook and Google, according to AP. Biden collected twice as many delegates as Sanders in the March 17 primaries and now needs less than 47% of the remaining delegates not allocated to clinch the nomination.
As Sanders weighed his next move to combat what AP called Biden’s “essentially insurmountable delegate lead,” his profane response to one CNN reporter Wednesday about his timeframe for dropping out of the race belied his campaign’s reported cooperation with Biden on the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Sanders campaign officials said there was no “sugarcoating” the candidate’s primary losses as Biden moved to court Sanders supporters. Emphasizing a “common vision” in a video tweeted on Tuesday night, the former vice president appealed to Sanders Democrats with a reminder that his campaign was “building the broad coalition we need to win in November.”
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